Page 3 of Never Love a Duke

“Allow me,” he murmured, as his warm palm soothed a path up the nape of her neck, into her hair, massaging her scalp. Pulling her free. Tilting her head back. Up to his gaze.

“May I?” he asked.

She had heard all kinds of stories from women about their first kisses, stolen kisses, and more, but this moment was hers. Tender. Patient. Yet intensely fierce. How could that be? She needed to know more.

“Yes,” she whispered.

And the slow descent of his lips to hers was quite possibly the longest wait she had ever succumbed to. Longer than the nightly waits for tepid lemonade at Almack’s. Longer than the wait for next year’s Christmas immediately after opening gifts. Longer than traversing the vast ocean across the Atlantic to visit Canada. Not that she’d been. Not that she’d been kissed before either.

But her lips opened to him all the same. He was magnetic. She couldn’t help herself from kissing a complete and utter stranger. Though she had been bracing herself against the trunk of the tree earlier, she now found her hands gripping his lapels.

What magical spell had Vauxhall cast to create such need within her?

BANG! POP! FIZZLE!

She pushed him back, thankfully interrupted by the pyrotechnic show overhead.

“I never—”

“I don’t normally—”

They both started at the same time, and chuckled when they locked gazes.

“I—” Her words were cut short again, but this time by a voice searching her out from the path.

“Mirabelle? Mirabelle? Are you there?” She knew that voice. And she knew exactly why they were calling her. She had a mission to complete tonight. How could she have allowed herself to be so distracted.

“I have to go,” she said in a hushed flurry.

And what was once a languid pace of conversation and exploration quickly turned frantic. “Wait.”

“I must go.”

“I must find you again.”

“I don’t think—”

“Tell me. What’s your name?”

“But—”

“You must give me your name.”

The hesitations were costing her precious time. “Lady Mirabelle Everly,” she huffed out.

“I’ll find you.” And for the briefest moment, she let her spinster heart dream that he might.

But he didn’t. He didn’t come at all. No knocking. No visiting. Not even a look.

Until she finally did see him again, by chance, and the look on his face was one of pure contempt.

That second encounter with him, Gabriel, the Duke of Thornhaven, devastated her. Deflated her. Demoralized her.

Perhaps that’s why she was recalling that precise memory and that particular feeling as she lay strewn on the ground of Kisswick, enveloped by rampant chaos just in time to peer up and take in the sight of that very man on a white stead, looking the very part of a daring knight on a rescue mission.

Chapter 3

“What the blazes is going on here?” Gabriel held Mirabelle’s head in his palms. As much as he despised the woman, on a human level—and only on that one—he still cared for her wellbeing.